A One-Handed Format: Duanju Where It Began
Chinese short drama’s story starts with a screen format instead of a corporation. The Chinese word duanju, which “short drama” translates word for word, names vertical shows framed at 9:16 for a handset held in one hand. A single reelshort free series title usually spans 20 to 100 instalments, with each episode lasting one to two minutes. The storylines are drawn from a proven stock of premises: billionaire and CEO romance, revenge plots, family feuds and hidden-identity reveals. A whole episode has to register before the viewer’s thumb moves on, so it matters that every one of those premises can be absorbed in seconds. Conventional television rarely had to ask how to sell a story in slices small enough to price one at a time, yet viewed as a business, this format solves exactly that question. English-speaking audiences now come across the same product under other names, such as microdrama, vertical drama and mobile drama. That pay-per-piece logic underlies every stage of the timeline below.
2020: The NRTA Puts the Genre on the Official Map
The opening milestone turns out to be administrative, not commercial. Back in 2020, the Chinese regulator, the NRTA, formally acknowledged duanju as a genre. Because recognition converts a vague category of online clips into something that can be classified, counted and overseen, the step matters more than it might appear. An officially named genre can be tracked from one year to the next, which is what enables later figures about the sector to be compared at all. None of this ensured commercial success, and a regulator’s attention can cut both ways for a nascent industry. It did, however, move short drama from the margins of online video toward the status of an industry with its own data. Four years later, the data revealed a sector large enough to stand comparison against the country’s cinemas.
2024: The Year Short Drama Outearned the Box Office
The home-market figures for 2024 are the most obvious measure of how far the format had come. In China, short drama income reached 50.5 billion yuan, equal to about $7 billion, according to data released in mid-2025. For the first time, the sector earned more than China’s box office, a symbolic crossover for an industry made of one- and two-minute episodes. Estimates placed the audience that year at 662 million viewers. Producers put out more than 30,000 titles over the same twelve months. That output is as revealing about the industry’s structure as the revenue is: a business releasing tens of thousands of titles a year is testing concepts at scale. Stiff competition is signaled too, as every one of those titles is fighting for the same few minutes of a viewer’s day. However, the push abroad had not waited for this milestone: by 2024 several Chinese-linked companies were already offering the same model abroad.
Going Overseas: The Chinese-Linked Apps Leading the Export Wave
ReelShort came first out of the gate, arriving in August 2022. Crazy Maple Studio of Sunnyvale, California, runs the app, and China-based COL Group stands behind the studio. DramaBox came next in April 2023; it is built by Beijing Dianzhong Technology and owned by that company’s Singapore subsidiary, StoryMatrix. Singapore New Reading Technology launched GoodShort in June 2023; the company is reportedly linked to Beijing New Reading Times, though that parent link rests on a weaker source. For the United States, Canada and Australia, Jiuzhou Culture launched ShortTV, alongside 99TV for Southeast Asia, and evidence suggests that ShortMax is the same app under another name, even though no rename has been officially announced. Kunlun Tech arrived in September 2024 with DramaWave, released through its Skywork AI business, and its FreeReels app led global downloads in the first quarter of 2026, according to Sensor Tower. The recurring pattern is a Western-facing entity in California, Singapore or Hong Kong fronting a business whose capital or parentage traces back to China. What people who watch dramas online in English actually see is a vertical streaming service with a free opening and a paywall; that corporate map is largely invisible to them.
| Company | Service | Chinese link | Launched |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Maple Studio (Sunnyvale, California) | ReelShort | China-based COL Group backs it | August 2022 |
| StoryMatrix Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | DramaBox | A Singapore subsidiary of Beijing Dianzhong Technology | April 2023 |
| Singapore New Reading Technology Pte. Ltd. | GoodShort | Reportedly belongs to Beijing New Reading Times | June 2023 |
| SHORTTV LIMITED (Hong Kong) | ShortTV / ShortMax | Jiuzhou Culture; the two names seem to be one app | September 2023 |
| SKYWORK AI PTE LTD | DramaWave | Part of Kunlun Tech’s Skywork AI business | September 2024 |
| Kunlun Tech | FreeReels | App owned by Kunlun Tech | Not confirmed; top global downloads in Q1 2026 |
| Holywater (founded in Kyiv, 2020) | My Drama | No link; Fox Entertainment stake since October 2025 | Spring 2024 |
Dubbed Imports Against Western Originals
What to fill the apps with became the strategic question after they existed. Jiuzhou’s answer, as reported by China Daily in January 2024, drew heavily on its home catalogue. Of more than 600 mini-dramas it had made for overseas markets, about 80 percent were dubbed Chinese adaptations and 20 percent were original overseas productions. In the same report, the cost of a 70-episode series was placed at $100,000 to $150,000. For a company with a rich domestic library, dubbing makes obvious sense, because it prolongs the life of titles already paid for. Although Western originals are more expensive, with TheWrap citing $150,000 to $300,000 per series shot in eight to ten days, they reach the audience without a translation layer. TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women and about half were in the US, which shows that this audience is specific. DramaBox runs a production team in Los Angeles, and its lineup includes titles such as Fake Dating My Rich Nemesis. Most visibly, Holywater shows that the originals market has also attracted companies without Chinese roots; its My Drama app took an equity investment from Fox Entertainment in October 2025, along with a Fox commitment to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years.
2025 and 2026: What the Market Trackers Show
By 2025 the overseas business was being tracked by several research firms, and their figures differ in instructive ways. Sensor Tower estimated that, worldwide in-app revenue for short-drama apps reached about $700 million in the first quarter of 2025, of which the United States contributed 49 percent, or roughly $350 million. For the whole year, Sensor Tower’s data puts in-app revenue at about $2.8 billion to $3 billion, up roughly 115 percent; different reports of the same dataset cite slightly different totals. Omdia takes a wider view: it estimates total microdrama revenue at $11 billion in 2025, with $3 billion of it earned outside China, and projects $14 billion by the end of 2026. Omdia also expects the US to reach $1.5 billion in 2026, half of all revenue outside China. Media Partners Asia, in estimates reported in August 2026, put revenue outside China at $2.7 billion for 2025, $3.6 billion for 2026 and $9.5 billion by 2031. MPA pegs ReelShort’s revenue at $785 million in 2025 and forecasts $1.05 billion in 2026, with about $40 million in net profit. For this timeline, its market-share estimates are the most revealing: ReelShort at about 29 percent outside China, 21 percent for DramaBox, 13 percent for DramaWave and 6 percent for GoodShort, or roughly 69 percent combined for four apps with Chinese links.
Looking Ahead Along the Timeline
Laid end to end, the milestones show a few patterns. First, the overseas business still looks limited next to its origin: Omdia’s figures imply that most microdrama revenue in 2025 was earned inside China. The second pattern is that growth is likely slowing, as Sensor Tower puts the first quarter of 2026 at about $750 million, up 20 percent year on year, after triple-digit growth across 2025. DramaBox and ReelShort each brought in about $140 million in that quarter, so competition at the top has tightened as well. Prices differ by country, platform and promotion, but monetization has taken on a familiar shape, with a weekly VIP pass costing about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026 for apps such as ReelShort, ShortMax, DramaWave, GoodShort and My Drama. Production is the area most likely to change next: DramaWave, whose annualized revenue exceeded $700 million by the second quarter of 2026, reportedly generates more than 80 percent of its new releases with AI. Whether dubbed imports, Western originals or AI output claim the next phase, the product stays the one duanju producers built at home: a story sold a minute at a time.